The Africa Debate: Foreign Secretary speech
The Foreign Secretary gave a speech at The Africa Debate on 2 July 2025.
Ladies and Gentleman, Friends.
It’s a great, great pleasure to be here today. Thank you to Sumaila and the team behind the Africa Debate, for bringing us all together.
This week, it’s 25 years since I was first elected the Member of Parliament for Tottenham and therefore began my journey in public life. So I want to start by looking back for just a moment in time.
I was a Member of Parliament and then a Junior Minister in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And they were both very, very focused on Africa and the continent of Africa.
However, when I look back on that period, it was most definitely principally through the lens of development and aid. This was the era of the Jubilee debt campaign. It was absolutely the era of the Millennium Development Goals. Make Poverty History was the theme of the day and the G8 Summit in Gleneagles in 2005, implementing many of the recommendations of Blair’s Commission for Africa.
These efforts left of course a legacy. In 2000, almost two-thirds of all sub-Saharan Africans lived on under three dollars a day, by 2010, when Gordon Brown left office, the figure was under half.
But when I became Foreign Secretary last year, I wanted to modernise our approach to Africa, modernise our approach to development.
I of course had been travelling to the continent for many, many years, the first country I ever visited was Kenya. But I’d seen the transformation of cities and communities, all brimming with huge potential.
And I suppose I also benefited from my own heritage in the Global South. My parents hailed from Guyana. And so I understood some of the frustrations of countries and communities when it felt like the West was ignoring people or not listening to people, not understanding what they really needed.
I wanted to change that. And to reset relations then with the Global South, and particularly with Africa. And to implement a new approach, partnership, not paternalism.
Genuine partnership is, by definition, between two equals each respecting the other. So in this job, I have tried to show that respect. And in the past year, I have visited eight African countries. The first Foreign Secretary to visit South Africa or Morocco since William Hague. And the first Foreign Secretary ever to visit the great country of Chad.
And on my first visit to the continent as Foreign Secretary, I launched consultations on our new Africa Approach. A five-month listening exercise, hearing from governments, from civil society and diaspora communities, from businesses and universities, from Cape Town to Cairo, from Dakar to Djibouti, what they valued, what they wanted to see from Britain.
We needed to listen. And I thank you all for your engagement over the course of this process and for what you told us, what we needed to hear.
The message actually didn’t surprise me. Because what African people want from Britain is exactly what British people want from Africa. You want, we want, growth.
And not just any form of growth, a jump in numbers on a spreadsheet for a year or two.
But a secure, sustainable growth for everyone, high-quality jobs, affordable prices, citizens living better lives than those of their ancestors.
You want, we want, opportunity.
Opportunity arising from our respective strengths, like the British education system, like of course the City of London, the incredible natural assets and energised young people across Africa, and our collective commitment to multilateralism.
And you want, and we want partnerships. Partnerships that harness our deep historic ties, and the array of personal connections that exist between us.
But partnerships that also continue to grow and deepen, as we both invest in them. That’s just a snapshot of a detailed piece of work.
But of course, the work can only be beginning. The real test of our Africa Approach, and this was clear in the consultation as well, is how we put it into practice.
Because talk is cheap. It’s actions in the end that count. I am excited by the deals driving growth that we have been delivering so far.
A new Strategic Partnership with Nigeria, a new growth plan with South Africa, a new partnership with Morocco, joint work on a new AI strategy in Ghana, and new investments in Tanzania and of course in Kenya, announced in the first East Africa Trade and Investment Forum here in London in May.
And thanks to our Developing Countries Trading Scheme, and free trade agreements with many African countries, almost £15 billion of goods were exported from Africa to Britain tariff-free last year.
And following the publication of the British Government’s new Trade Strategy, we will further simplify the rules of the DCTS scheme which benefits thirty-eight African countries, and review our tariffs with South Africa, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia.
The Trade Strategy reinforces Britain’s belief in the power of free trade. And the largest free trade area in the world is Africa’s.
And that’s why we back the rollout of the African Continent Free Trade Agreement, reducing barriers to intra-African trade through support in areas like digital trade and custom cooperation.
And we will increase opportunities for British firms to play their part, just as it will increase prosperity in Africa. The British businesses and investors in this room have a big part to play. And I want our Ambassadors, our High Commissioners working closely with you, so that together, we can play a confident role in investing more, and supporting the growth of the African market.
So, more trade, more investment, this is the best path to prosperity for all.
And there is a role of course for development as well. But this has to be a modernised approach to development, recognising that fundamentally development is about growth, development is about jobs, development is about business.
The modern development expert needs to have a mindset of an investor, not a donor. Looking for the best return, not offering the biggest handout.
And it’s in that spirit that British International Investment recently signed an MoU with South Africa’s Public Investment Corporation, one of Africa’s largest asset managers.
And this week agreed to support Wave Money Mobile, an exciting African fintech unicorn.
And it’s also in that spirit that Britain is co-hosting the next Global Fund replenishment summit in South Africa.
And just last week I made a £1.25 billion pledge to the recent Gavi replenishment in Brussels, the largest of any sovereign donor.
That work will save lives – many, many millions. But it will also unlock economic value -every pound given to Gavi drives £54 in wider economic benefit.
And, crucially, it unlocks value in Britain and Africa. Gavi works closely with cutting-edge British pharmaceutical firms like GSK. And it’s also designed the first African Vaccine Manufacturing Accelerator, which is using industry partnerships to deliver vaccines for Africa.
Vaccines, and this is very important, because people talked about that during the COVID pandemic, they asked the question, why, why are we failing, the West failing to vaccinate the African continent, and that was an important question.
But there was a second question – why has the African continent not got its own manufacturing capability, and that is what we now need to deliver in Africa.
Working with partners like Nigeria, we are pushing for organisations like Gavi and the Global Fund to work together and reform, so that their work has national ownership at its heart.
National ownership is similarly important when it comes to reforming wider international finance, especially for climate and nature.
And thank you, President Ruto, for your leadership on the climate issue particularly. The theme of your conference is precisely the right framing, Africa has Natural Capital. But it cannot unlock this if we make it impossibly challenging for states to access the finance that they need.
At the recent Development Finance Summit in Seville, we were again pushing for reforms of the multilateral development banks and the IMF. We have to mobilise private capital and use guarantees to unlock more funds.
To empower regional development banks, like the African Development Bank, where developing countries have more of a voice. To tackle unsustainable debt. To work with the City to bring innovations like disaster risk insurance and strengthen local capital markets.
One example of what this can mean comes from Sierra Leone, where I can announce £2 million pounds worth of British government investment to back a mangrove restoration project by West Africa Blue. The project protects over 90,000 hectares of mangrove estuaries, improving coastal and community resilience.
But it is also demonstrating how this model can be commercially viable, unlocking future investment in similar projects in the future. And finally, alongside our work on trade, on investment and development finance, we have heard the clear message from the consultation on illicit finance as well.
I know that this message is not new. For years, friends in Africa have been saying Britain needs to do more to tackle dirty money. Kleptocrats and money launderers rob all our citizens of wealth and security.
And now, the Government is listening too. That’s why I’ve started imposing sanctions on crooks who siphon off public money for themselves, like Isabel dos Santos of Angola and Kamlesh Pattni’s illicit gold smuggling network.
And that’s why I’ve also announced that London will be hosting a Countering Illicit Finance Summit, bringing together a broad range and a broad coalition from the Global North and the Global South, to drive these criminals out of our economies.
Friends, I said the messages of our recent consultations were that Africa wanted more growth, Africa wanted more opportunities, Africa wanted more partnerships.
In effect, Africa wants Britain to help them to have more choices. Choices over who to do business with, because it’s choices which matter in a volatile geopolitical age.
Britain wants choices too. And I believe that, given the choice, more and more British businesses and investors will be choosing Africa in the coming years.
But don’t take my word for it – let’s hear from an African voice. It’s my pleasure now to introduce to the stage a great partner of the UK, a global leader on climate and nature action, and our next keynote speaker, His Excellency, Dr William Ruto, President of the Republic of Kenya.